I’d have to say it pretty much started germinating around 1977 after hearing
what David Bowie and Brian Eno were doing on the LOWalbum.
That album marked an important musical turning point for a number of reasons, but
for me personally, it was then that I fully realized that there would
soon be major changes coming to modern rock music, a wholesale shift in content
and production, that would
infuse more tangential, avant-garde ideas and concepts into the pop
music format, and give it a very distinct, urbane vocabulary. Bands like Roxy Music and
the Velvet Underground had tapped into this vein earlier in the decade, but
Bowie & Eno took it to the next level on LOW. The end result was a
flood of new bands – Talking Heads, Devo, Ultravox, Japan, Urban Verbs, Bill
Nelson, the Cars, Gary Numan, Robert Fripp, Simple Minds, Magazine, etc. – all
taking those post-LOW ideas and further fleshing them out into a variety of
unique and musically challenging styles. Plus, the cost of home recording
equipment was also starting to become more affordable around the same time, and
it was giving rise to the whole do-it-yourself syndrome. Shortly thereafter, I
remember hearing Ultravox’s Systems of Romance album, and I just said to myself, “this is IT”, I’ve got
to get my studio together, start working on writing some material and forming a
band. That would have been around 1978. So it took a few years to finally get
all the pieces for the project together.

You also did a solo project in the interim, in 1980, before forming
System 56, called Aftermath – what was that all about?

SS:

Just a small self-produced project I released as a 45 (Automatic
Entertainment / Blind to View) as a result of some of the instrumental
experimentation I was doing at the time, trying to figure out how to blend
synthesizer and guitar sounds together. It was all composed and recorded in the
living room of my 1-bedroom apartment, using a very primitive drum machine,
guitar, a couple of synths, and a TEAC 4-track tape deck. But it was a very
useful exercise in many respects, and motivated me to keep moving forward to getting System 56 together a
couple years later. The record received a bit of airplay on the local college
radio circuit, and even got reviewed nationally in Trouser Press (Sept. 1980)
and Heavy Metal (Dec. 1980).

So how
did System 56 finally come about?

SS:

In 1981, I started running a series of musicians-wanted ads in Scene
magazine in Cleveland, basically looking for people with compatible ideas and
goals, who wanted to do original music, not just an endless parade of Billboard
Top 40 cover tunes. At the time, independent bands who were doing their own
original material were generally short-lived, primarily because they were
usually strapped for working capital, and limited to playing the lesser-known underground clubs and venues - so they usually ended up
playing to the same 50 people, while trying to eek out a meager existence. In
spite of these obstacles, many of them regularly gutted it out on the club
scene, and aimed to establish a reputation of one sort or another, hoping some
hot-shot record company A&R scout would recognize their musical talents, and
sign them to a record deal. That road just didn’t seem very practical or
appealing to me – so I tried to convince any potential band members that System
56 was going to concentrate on recording and releasing the music ourselves, as
opposed to slogging it out on the club circuit.

Eventually, I found the (3)
other guys – Chuck Ryder, Kevin Lytle, and Vince Scafiti – who would complete
the picture. Chuck was probably my closest musical ally at the time, in terms of
understanding where I wanted to take System 56 and what it should sound like. He
had a similar background to mine, as a member of a 2-man synth-based duo called
LUXUS. Although Chuck’s primary role was as our bass player, he also had
a very good sense for the overall feeling of the music, the engineering and
production side of recording, and how to get it down on tape. The end result,
after a couple months of rehearsals and demos, was our first single
Metro-Metro / In the Old World, released in the spring of 1982.

How did
the band get it’s name?

SS:

It was just a natural outgrowth of my life-long interest in cybernetics and
cultural theory, more so than having any particular musical significance. I
guess you can credit Aldous Huxley, Buckminster Fuller, and Douglas Hofstadter
for that. I’ve always envisioned a rock band as kind of an artificial construct
to begin with, little cybernetic microcosms in themselves, prone to chaotic,
internal dynamics, which occasionally give rise to unexpected outputs, both good
and not-so-good. Thus the analogy of a
“system”. Plus, the name had a certain alliterative quality to it rolling off
the tongue, and it seemed to fit us pretty well.

What
happened to the band after your first single?

SS:

Well, the band actually played out a couple of times at The Bank in
Akron. Nothing very elaborate, just a couple of weekday gigs to get our feet
wet, and play before a live audience. We were total unknowns at the time, even
with the Metro-Metro single out, and were getting only minimal airplay on
the local college stations. However, there were also some little rifts developing in the
band around this time as well, and we weren’t exactly getting along as well as
we could have. Shortly thereafter, we parted company with Chuck and Kevin (the
usual artistic differences), and set out for the next challenge of recording
Beyond the Parade.

What
was it like handling all of the instrumental chores on Beyond the Parade?

SS:

Fairly challenging, to say the least. Being first and foremost a guitar player, it wasn’t too much
of stretch to switch over to electric bass, although we also used synthetic
keyboard bass on the record as well. The synth parts were a little more
difficult, because I don’t have the chops for keyboards in the same way I would
for guitar. I basically just had to feel my way through it. However, once Vince and I got the basic rhythm tracks laid down, it
was somewhat easier to fill in the guitar and synth parts, and became a matter
of working each section of a song until it felt like it was in the right place,
before finally moving on to the final vocal tracks. The tricky part was bouncing all the
sub-mixed tracks down ahead of time, to free up more space on the tape, as we
were still using the TEAC 4-track deck at the time. There were some trade-offs
we had to make in terms of EQ and signal-to-noise levels, which we could have
readily tweaked in
the final mix on a larger deck, but in the end, we were pretty satisfied with
the way it turned out.

You
finally got a new keyboard player in 1983 – Paul Teagle – how did that affect
the direction of the band?

SS:

Paul was just coming off a stint with a Kent-based band called Unit 5,
when Vince brought him in for an audition, before we did the next record. Paul
wasn’t a typical keyboardist in the traditional sense, but more of an experimenter
and synthesist. In other words, he tended to work with the technology of the
synth itself, as opposed to devising lyrical melody lines and counterpoints. But
he had enough keyboard chops to get the job done at the musical end. That was
just fine with me, because we needed someone to give some different shape and texture to
the musical ideas that I was bringing in as the group's songwriter. The result was the
single Life On a Cool Curve / The Other Side of Science. It proved to be
one of our most memorable records.

There’s
some intriguing synth sounds on that record – what kind of equipment were you
using?

SS:

We used a little bit of everything in that session. The sequencer parts on
Cool Curve were all done on a Roland SH-101, using it’s built in arpeggiator. The higher end synth was actually a Multivox MX-202 string machine.
There’s some Korg MS-20 sounds on The Other Side of Science, but all of
the atmospheric stuff that Paul was doing, was on an Oberheim OBX-a synth –
nice, big, fat analog sounds. He was always able to coax some compelling noises
out of it. The Oberheim could be a bit of an unwieldy synth, and it had a lot of
unexpected surprises built in, as well, but Paul made the most of them.

In
1984, you finally added a new bass player – Tom Lash – what impact did that have
on the band?

SS

:
Tom had previously been playing bass for a few years in another local Cleveland
band called Lucky Pierre, which was going through a dissolution process
right around the time we were looking to add someone to our lineup, to play
bass. Since we wanted to start doing some live shows again, as well as continue
to record, we needed someone who had experience in both areas, and Tom happened
to have the whole skill set that we were looking for. Lucky Pierre
had always been more of a no-frills, straight-ahead rock band, and Tom was
probably the “purest” musician out of all of us, plus he could do some singing
as well. By adding him to the mix, we started to become more of a stand-up
combo, as opposed to strictly a studio ensemble. We began to work through a lot
of new material in live rehearsal situations, hammering out arrangements ahead
of the studio sessions. In addition, this gave us a chance to introduce Tom to
our earlier material, and begin working toward final arrangements on those
songs, in a live setting.

It seemed like the band became more guitar-oriented after that – would
that be a fair statement?

SS: Yes, and no. Certainly that would be
true of the follow-on single - A Man Needs a Motor / Shapes of Things,
which features the guitar in a more prominent role, although there’s still
plenty of synth work on the B-side, especially towards the end, in addition to
the driving guitar. It was certainly never an intentional change that we tried
to make, but was ultimately determined by where any particular song seemed to be
taking us. On the other hand, if you consider the other songs from that same
time period – The Sounding, Your Car is Waiting, and Next to X, you’d
probably agree that it was still pretty well balanced. But since the single
usually gets the bulk of the attention, it may have come off that way in the
short term.

The band finally returned to the stage later in 1984 – what was that like?

SS: The summer of 1984 was a particularly
hectic time for the band, between finishing up the final mixes on the material
we had recorded in the spring, getting ready for the live shows, and releasing
the single on schedule. All this was going on while all of us were working
regular 9-5 day jobs, so needless to say, we were getting pretty over-extended.
We even found ourselves auditioning for a second keyboardist, halfway through
rehearsals, when we realized that we had too many synth parts for just one guy to handle. So we brought in Dennis Richie (formerly of The Times)
to help out with the overflow. It turned out to be a good move, as it reduced
the stress level on Paul, and gave us a little more stage presence, as well.

Overall, the live shows went
pretty well, as our Cleveland debut in the Phantasy Theatre was a real watershed
event for the band, having worked our tails off to make that happen, amidst all
the other activity going on behind the scenes. In retrospect, I thought the
smaller-scale gigs upstairs in the Phantasy Nite Club had a much more intimate
and spontaneous atmosphere, as the band was more relaxed and in closer proximity
to the crowd.

Which
other artists have influenced your music?

SS: It depends on how far back you want to
go. I came of age musically, in the late 1960s, so all my early musical heroes
were guitarists like Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Roger McGuinn, and Jeff Beck. I
later went through an extended jazz phase in the early 70s, where I was
listening to music that was considerably beyond my ability to play - but I was
intrigued by the way it was composed and produced – especially Weather Report and anything on
the ECM label (e.g. Terje Rypdal, John Abercrombie, Ralph Towner, Eberhard Weber come to mind). In the mid-70s, I started listening to bands like Kraftwerk,
Tangerine Dream, Fripp & Eno, Vangelis – all the spacey, electronic stuff coming
out of Europe, which sort of laid the groundwork for the synthesizer side of me.
You won’t necessarily hear all of those influences on display in System 56, but
that’s the music that was swirling around my head prior to 1977, and became the
background landscape for any subsequent musical ideas to follow. Later on, I
started paying closer attention to a number of producers as well – Brian Eno
(Cluster, Talking Heads, Devo), Roy Thomas Baker (Cars, Queen), Steve Lillywhite
(Ultravox, U2) and John Punter (Roxy Music, Japan) - all made impressions on me,
as I would try to emulate things they were doing on record in my little
make-shift, home studio. Using the studio as an instrument in and of itself was
an idea that had a lot of appeal to me, so I had a tendency to listen to people
who were doing this effectively already.

Where
do the ideas for your songs and lyrics come from?

SS:

All over the place actually. I tend to read quite a bit, so I continually find
inspiration and ideas for songs from all sorts of literary sources, everything
from science fiction to advertising blurbs to dada poetry to engineering and
technical manuals. Interesting things are being said and written all the time,
sometimes in the most unlikely places. It’s just a matter of noting them in some
way when I hear them or read them, then incorporating other musical ideas to
give them focus and direction later on. Sometimes the most mundane sentence or
phrase can trigger
an avalanche of lyrical ideas. I just try to stay open to those kinds of
possibilities. I usually
find myself starting with a
song title and working backwards, fleshing out the lyrics, and trying to discover the song’s
natural tempo. The music is almost an afterthought to the lyrical structure,
which to me, has to hold together on its own. Once the basic lyrical structure
has been established, it then gives rise to things like rhythm, meter, and
phrasing, which is where I like to get the drums involved, because that
basically sets the table for everything else. It sounds a bit
counter-intuitive, but that’s how it works. There’s all sorts of ways to
approach composition. If I’m doing an instrumental piece, it usually begins with some
scrap of a rhythmic idea, which I monotonously listen to over and over again,
until it starts to almost hypnotize me - as I try to find out what the rhythm is suggesting. We even included one
of these raw experiments on the Beyond the Parade e.p., called Rhythm Before
Reason, which is just a tape loop of one of Vince’s drum beats, repeating ad
infinitum. As the piece progresses, the synths start to blend in, and it becomes
almost like a self-perpetuating mandala. On record, the piece is only a couple
minutes long , but the actual take was considerably longer, yet just as
interesting, despite the repetitive drum beat. I’m always reminded of one of Eno’s oblique strategies – “repetition is a form of change” – when I think of
the idea behind that piece. Psychologically, the mind is always trying to
extract meaning and context from sound patterns, even when the changes are
nearly nonexistent.